Wheel me down to the shore
Where the lighthouse was abandoned
And the moon tolls in the rafters
Let me hear the wind paging through the trees
And see the stars flaring out one by one
Like the forgotten faces of the dead
I was never able to pray
But let me inscribe my name
In the book of waves
Under a dome
Of a sky that never ends
And see my voice sail into the night
Edward Hirsch has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of ten poetry collections and five prose books. He has been president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation since 2002.